I don’t want to be old
I don’t want to make excuses
About my unsteady step
I don’t want to turn and face
Scary things inside my body.
I don’t want to watch the watchers
No longer watching me
I don’t want them to say
Tsk, tsk,
And shoot sly winking smiles
(Bet she was a looker when she was young)
At one another, as they ogle those
Ungreying others in their quick strides
Toward the myriad of their tasks,
Stumbles and surprises
And I don’t want to be invisible
Like the old ladies drooling
In their wheelchairs
In the warehouses set up for them
In our cruel national repugnance
And nor do I
Want a special driver’s license,
Discounts to keep my teeth ship-shape,
My hearing keen,
My any, many premiums at an all time low!
Call now!
I don’t want the faux deference
From a passel of hustlers looking
At me and thinking there must be a
Way to make a buck or two.
They have no idea how rage
Turns to fire
And how I can and will
Obliterate their dreams, along with
Anything else getting in my way
Don’t suggest it’s time to put in
An elevator to carry
My looming infirmity upstairs
Do not reconfigure my
House to match what some greedy
Snake-oil salesmen would like to peddle—
Short of consignment to one
Of those places eating up any
Legacy and fortune that will be left
To the children—for I care not
About someone else’s dreams,
Of course, and by the way,
Fuck them, fuck them and
Their coarse green dreams of dollars.
Leave me alone.
Do not patronize
Do not share a friendly elder joke
Do not turn in your delimitus
Because you wish to avoid my belittling
You cannot see it coming,
You cannot touch my power.
And anyway,
You won’t find me
And you won’t know me
And if you try
You will spoil just like the
Rotting apples on the ground
Of my autumn birthday
And if somehow you see
The tracks of my shoes
In my muddy garden
As I kick all that’s in my way
You will know,
Because you read these lines,
That every golden woman
Fighting the platitudes and
Cheap dismissive assignations
That accumulate like leaves from
My Japanese maple just before they fall
Is I. Is me. She. We.
No graceful aging here,
No airbrushed portrait, no giving in,
No forgiving of assumptions and
No starting over in
The constraints of time.
None of this. None of that.
No nothing but the raw edge of
A life lived gasping for the breath
Of meaning and of relevance,
Though knowing in the end
It’s mostly dust, and the silvered,
Lonesome, wayward jangle of
A few stars along the way.
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